24/10/2009 • 06:51 0
Open access to knowledge is something I firmly believe in. The open access week perhaps provides a good oportunity to us all to learn more about the movement and its aims.
There are more and more individuals as well as universities opening access to knowledge. An open society can provide a better future to us all.
A few useful links:
Open access week
Wikipedia: Open access publishing
SPARC Europe
Science Commons
CC Learn
Directory of Open Access Journals
22/07/2009 • 10:13 0
When management of higher educational institutions don’t know much about e-learning, they tend to assume (at least the ones that I’ve had to deal with) that it’s simple, fast (something that can be done in teachers’ free time) and that it’s a cost effective replacement for face-to-face teaching of foreign languages in small groups. When they want to cut institutional costs, foreign languages seem to be the ones that have to be sacrificed first. It’s not a new story – I know.
What I can do as a teacher is probably just to keep providing professional explanations for why cutting classes of foreign languages will not be good for students’ study and future careers and explaining language acquisition theories and results of research that serve as a basis for FL pedagogy. I’m also ready to share my knowledge of pedagogy with my colleagues who tend to specialize in a subject field but know little about teaching. In a similar effort I’m trying to introduce them to the open documents movement, PLEs, wikis, blogs, open courseware for e-learning and some pedagogy underlying e-learning. At least those who are ready to listen and learn.
It seems knowledge of course authoring tools might also benefit my colleagues (some of them have recently started to get familiar with Moodle), so based on the list of course authoring tools at the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies I’m now trying to explore the ones available for free. The commercial tools do look great but as a teacher I know that good looks cannot hide poor contents. I’m sure the free tools will do. So just a quick starter for those interested in course authoring tools and learning objects (LOs).
One of my favourite downloadable course authoring tools is Xerte – a tool that is simple and efficient. You can learn how to use it by watching this video. You can use it in Moodle too.
Planner tool - GloMaker 2
Glo Maker 2 seems promising especially because of its planner tool that is especially helpful to people with less pedagogical knowledge. It’ll be released in August this year. It’s downloadable.
My favorite online course authoring tool is MyUdutu. You can build a learning object online and download it for free. Hosting is also provided but they charge for it. You can check their tutorials. Udutu LOs can be used in Moodle.
I’d also recommend reading David Wiley’s review of learning object literature, advice on assessment and accessibility issues of e-learning design by TechDis, the article ‘Learning Objects Update: Review and Critical Approach to Content Aggregation’ by Balatsoukas, Morris & O’Brien (available here.). More articles can be found in Educause Review, the Interdisciplinary Journal of E-Learning and Learning Objects (IJELLO) and at Learnativity. The history of learning objects is also quite interesting and can be found here. I’ve also found two interesting blogs: one is Iterating toward openness that discusses issues of instructional-technology, open content and open-education, the other – RLO Blog with advice on learning object design.
Filed under: Teaching, Useful sites/links
19/04/2009 • 09:17 0
This video by Stephen Downes is still worth watching although it comes from a conference that was two years ago!
Right at the end Downes says something that strikes me as very important. He says:
This is not a message about how you should create a learning environment for your studets …. but this is a message about how you should learn.
I can’t stop thinking about the things I could do for my students, the opportunities I could create for them to learn. That seems the perspective from which I view teaching and myself as a teacher. It takes a shift in our views, a shift in our pedagogies or philosophies I guess.
Earlier on I was watching presentations at Educamp09 at http://bit.ly/R2tay when somebody said something along the line:
I can see my students use all these Web 2.0 tools but they don’t seem to use them for learning.
It struck a chord with me. However, the more I think about it the more I think this is a symtom of a situation which is not about Web 2.0 or e-learning but about our own philosophy so typical of an educational environment. We believe we have to make students learn what is good for them. But are we really sure this is what they need? What if they watch jokes and music spots on YouTube because this is exactly what they need? They may not want to become what we (or the society) want them to be. A shift in our viewpoint is needed. I’m not quite there yet. Perhaps rethinking what we want to help our students learn could be the first step and Stephen Downes is qite helpful here as well. Check his article Things you really need to learn.
13/04/2009 • 09:34 0
“Learner corpora” is a concept that has a definite meaning (i.e. a corpus of language produced by foreign language learners), so I was pretty surprised when I discovered that Sharon Hartle and Sian Morgan’s IATEFL video focuses only on using general corpora in the classroom. I felt mislead by the title.
The presenters do suggest how teachers can make use of concordancing resources with their B2-C1 students, which is definitely positive. It’s a pity though that the authors’ selection of concordancers was based on personal preference and their choices were not fully explained and justified.
12/04/2009 • 11:46 0
Mark Perensky said some very interesting things in an interview at the IATEFL conference in Cardiff. He raised for example the issue of the relationship between modern technology and teachers and said:
Before you can take advantage of modern technology, you have to change pegagogy.
I couldn’t agree more. We are flooded with new tools that aim to enhance our teaching practices. And too many CALL workshops focus on what needs to be clicked on to make a tool functional. But untill it’s not clear to us what pedagogical assumptions lie behind the new tool and what change it would bring to our teaching practices, we should not use it. However, once we are comfortable with the change in the pedagogy and the new tool, we can do wonders.
Also, Perensky suggests that schools should invest in modern technology wisely: some of the tools (e.g. interactive board) are very expensive and the scool would be better of investing that money into something that would be more useful to their students (e.g. 3D printers, iphones, etc.).
Finally, I support another idea of Perensky:
Governments should invest into pedagogy … and technology will actually take care of itself.
Here’s the video.
